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"That sounds pretty cool. I'm not really looking for new projects right now because I want to spend my time on the ones I've got going already, but if you want, I can send you a list of programming resources* you might find useful."

If they respond with "But don't you like my idea?" or "You mean you don't want to help me?" respond with something like "I haven't done enough research to know if the idea is good or not, and it's really hard to predict how the market is going to go, especially in technology. I think it'd be awesome if you built this thing... I just can't offer much more than moral support, high-fives, and maybe a little bit of advice. If you really want someone to build this, try hiring a freelancer on ODesk... I just can't make the time right now."

Don't worry about whether the idea sucks; very few ideas survive through the full development of the product, and very few of these people will follow-through.

If they keep pushing, end the conversation with "Look, you're my friend, but I'd much rather we stay friends than become business partners." or "Look: I'm choosing to spend my time on my projects. This doesn't mean I don't like you, or that I dislike the idea; it just means that I'm not the guy to build it for you. I'll gladly point you to resources, or show you where to go to hire a programmer, but this is your project, and you should be the one to build it."

*Obviously, you'd have to compile a list like this, but that should be relatively easy to do.

My experience as both a student and a teacher (in several different schools) suggests that a decent number of teachers (less than half, but more than a few) become teachers mostly because they really like the power games that can be played in school, and the lording of authority.

I don't mean this to disparage teachers as a whole. But the power rush is pretty substantial, if one lets it take hold.

I had a similar experience, and am curious why you think you had the experience you did?

I grew up an unabashed geek in the midwest, and felt no more social isolation than anyone else in my peer group at school.

Some of this was because I played sports (not well, but this was a relatively small school so I wasn't going to get cut). Most of it, came down to two factors:

1) I didn't react to taunting, teasing, name-calling, or even the occasional bits of violence. I only really had to deal with this in 8th and 9th grade, but those who would do such things figured out after a while that I wasn't going to give them any satisfaction.

2) My peers respected people who were good at things. I was good at things (our academic bowl team won nationals, for example, and I had several short stories published). In fact, I'd go so far as to say most people respect people who are good at things, especially if that "good at things" is immediate and visible and public.

Frankly, if schools/teachers adopted a broader view of "success", and if they provided a chance for students to showcase their successes in a public fashion (I'm talking actual successes here, rather than "Congratulations! You're made of carbon, and that makes you special!" psuedo-successes designed to prop up self-esteem), a lot of the bullying would probably stop.

This seems like it could be really useful when paired with "The Gutenberg Method" (http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html), which basically asks students to do the assigned reading at home, along with some type of annotation of "Here's what to look for".

Then, in class the next day, the teacher answers any questions, briefly covers any difficult concepts, and they can spend the rest of the class-time engaging with each other instead of lecturing.

My suspicion (disclaimer: I was, at one point, a teacher) is that if you want people to use this service, you'll have to show how it improves instruction, and you'll have to do so in much more concrete terms than you have here.

That said, if I ever have a classroom of my own again, I can see myself using this tool when appropriate.

Congrats on the success of all this! Breaking even in 3 months takes some doing.

I noticed some places where I think I could clean up and improve the writing. Do you mind if I take a stab at it?

It can be a good teaching method or a bad one, depending on how it's used.

Personally, I enjoy having students come up to the whiteboard. But when we do so, I present it as the student at the board is a representative of the class. The whole thing is collaborative, and I have students who are sitting explain what the student at the board is doing.

What this means is that students who know what's going on are able to take the lead (when at the board), whereas students who are less confident can rely a bit on their classmates. The whole time, I stress "Look, we're learning new stuff and it's going to be challenging. Work together and you'll get it." This makes a different vibe than if we just sat and watched before I determine if the answer is correct or incorrect.

I don't use this for individual assessment, and I don't attach any guilt or shame. It's purely done to get students working in the Zone of Proximal Development and to get someone other than me talking.

I'm a few chapter's into Hartl's book now. I really appreciate how it explains most things on a few different levels, i.e. both the concrete and theoretical workings of a piece of code. I don't understand much yet, but instead of frustration (I've had a few programming books whose learning curves have turned vertical), I feel excitement.

If the start of the book is any indicator, it's a great resource.

"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn (as well as "My Ishmael") changed how I view the world and how I characterize contemporary issues. The Takers/Leavers dichotomy, while a tad simplistic, was jaw-dropping at the time.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" had a similar effect, though with the Classicist/Romanticist split more than any other part of the book. Also: "Itty-bitty rules for itty-bitty people" made quite a few things make sense.

One more thing: Challenging/important tasks.

Some of this gets filed under "Growth Prospects", and some of it gets filed under "Autonomy". If your employees have challenging and/or meaningful things to work on, and an environment where they feel they'll be successful, that makes it quite a bit easier to stick around.

Not to say that grunt work is bad, but your employees who need a larger motivation than "It's my job" or "It's how I earn money" need to see how the work they do contributes to something larger than the stack of paperwork on their desk.

Assuming he makes $50 every day for a calendar year, we're talking a little ways north of $18k/yr, before taxes. Not the biggest amount in the world, but certainly pretty substantial by any reasonable metric.

Alternatively: $50 seems to me like a pretty reachable number, while still being large enough that it's not immediately reachable.

Though I won't presume to know the OP's motivations.

I watched that match back in high school (his streak corresponded with my own academic bowl team's season), and "What is a hoe?" was my response, too.

I'd never heard that semantic sense of "rake" before, and felt somewhat scandalized that "hoe" would be a response on national television (while in high school, I felt great affinity toward the puritans).

My writing group uses Crocodoc when we exchange drafts and provide feedback. Keeping all of the annotations in one place means that I don't have to worry about having 4 different copies of a document (each one commented on by a different person) floating around my e-mail or hard drive.

In fact, this is a service I'd gladly pay for if the folks at Crocodoc would give me a way to do so.

I love Preview, but have found that when I use the annotation feature and send it to others who use other PDF viewers (FoxIt, Acrobat Reader, et al) that the annotations don't always behave like they should.

If you double click a few times on the game screen, that usually straightens it out.

I mean the whole thing. The advice given to Nick by his father (in his younger and more vulnerable years), the statements he makes about how others seem to see him as a confidante, and also the way he characterizes Gatsby ("a romantic readiness for hope"), and definitely the last sentence. Additionally: Nick's statements about conduct ("Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes...") and the "fundamental sense of decency". There's so much here.

When I taught "Gatsby", I did so in a Language & Rhetoric course. Instead of doing the standard New Critical Theory thing, we evaluated the statements Nick presents as factual, particularly those he makes about himself and about Gatsby, with the larger goal of 1) building a broader understanding of character as it relates to language and the presentation of the self, and 2) looking for inconsistencies (the end of Ch. 3, for example: "Everyone is guilty of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine. I am one of the most honest men I know." (paraphrased slightly)).

I can't speak conclusively to whether or not this was the best possible approach, but I will say that I had more than 30 students (out of just over 120) come up to me and say "Mr. E, this is the best book we've ever read in an English class." I'll also say that class discussions were livelier and better informed than any of the college literature courses I took (students were required to use quotations to back up almost every evaluative statement they made, and by the end of the 3-4 weeks we spent on "Gatsby" knew the book almost as well as I did. I cannot say the same for even my senior/grad level literature courses in college).

Thanks for posting this. I got called into work and missed today's Jeopardy! episode, so seeing this link was definitely a relief.

I've read "Gatsby" over 25 times in the last 5 years, and have taught it twice. It's my favourite piece of literature by far, and would be my nominee for "Most Beautifully Written Book In The English Language" (should such an award exist).

After you are finished, go back and re-read the first 2 pages or so (until the double-carriage return); they take on a whole new meaning when the end of the novel is known.

If you're okay with waiting a few hours/days, The Pirate Bay seems to have a good selection of torrents of recent Jeopardy! episodes, though I've not yet tried it.

You'll also be able to see a full transcript of the board, as well as all questions provided by contestants, at www.j-archive.com.

Human contestants are also able to see the question typed out (much like it's displayed on the television), so people are able to do this as well.

I'm usually able to read any given question in about a second. Granted, I used to practice speed-reading trivia questions for an hour or so per day (one of the leagues we competed in projected questions via powerpoint), but there's at least one reason most Jeopardy! contestants are able to buzz in almost immediately on most questions.

My college didn't have a college bowl team, but competing on high school teams and being responsible for more than a few correct two or three word answers, I can vouch for this.

It's all about having enough breadth that the other bits of information presented can help whittle down answers by way of association and relationships. Good trivia players rely quite a bit on intuition.

Ken Jennings mentioned (in his book) how Jeopardy! often has questions about rivers, so it was a fairly simple matter to just memorize river names and some basic associations with which to answer questions.

It seems like Watson is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (2880 processors?!). Though I guess it could also be said that humans are just ugly bags of mostly water.

That said: in something like medicine (differential diagnoses), such a system could also be extremely useful, given the frequent occurrence of a fairly limited number of "answers".

From their website:

"messiahStudio can be used as a complete stand-alone animation and rendering package, or as a powerful addition to Modo, Maya, 3DMAX, SoftImage XSI, LightWave, Cinema 4D or an in-house proprietary application; through extensive animation export capabilities (fbx, mdd, collada), Host Connection plugins and Host API."

When I read this the first time, I assumed that "animation" meant modeling as well, but only because I don't know very much about this whole process.

Thanks for pointing this out.

A google search for reviews doesn't turn up much, so you're probably not alone in saying "I've never heard of this".

Said search turns up quite a few rapidshare/torrenting links, but with a price point of only $40, I don't see why anyone would go that route.

If there's a reasonably reputable university nearby, one thing to see is if you can work part-time and go to school part-time (alternatively: see if you can telecommute). Your employer may even be able to help with tuition (time to brush up on those negotiatin' skills).

I'm going back to school next year to pursue an engineering degree (I used to be an English teacher), and will be working through via some of my freelance gigs.

A full courseload still leaves you with at least 20 hours per week to work a job while maintaining a social life, so you're certainly not going to be shackled.

There's a huge jump in psychosocial development that happens sometime in or shortly after the collegiate years, and it's a great place to meet people and to explore, at least for a few years. Ideally, you'll learn quite a bit, too, though that's mostly up to you to decide. Personally, I'd recommend taking a few linguistics courses, as well as a good writing course (rhetoric, if possible, and also narrative).

One thing to remember: if one of them doesn't pan out, you can always go do the other, or do something else. Now is not forever.

Best of luck.

In this case, this seems less about "educating B students" than it is finding multiple venues in which students can be successful. The student who does not get A's still has quite a few skills beyond the usual collegiate regiment of "Write this paper / take this test / attend this lecture".

Frankly, I'd like to see this entrepreneurial spirit be encouraged in high school (and even middle school!) as well as college. Students do pretty amazing things when they're given a chance to take ownership and responsibility of something with actual meaning.

One must certainly be prepared for failure and for flakiness. But I'd be more than happy to accept the risk of either in exchange for the chance of success. I'd definitely be willing to accept the risk of either for the chance that even just a few students would recognize that there is more to life than simply accepting one's place.

Had I not been a writing teacher when I read this book, I would not have appreciated it as much as I did. In particular, the "Itty-bitty rules for itty-bitty people" line (while he is at the U of Chicago) resonated with me.

You're right in that not much was particularly revelatory, as all of the discussed elements are discussed in multiple other places, often with greater depth.

But it's rare to see it all come together in a way that is almost immediately pragmatic and sensible.

The schism between classicism and romanticism, as presented in "Zen", changed the way I view the world. I've been slowly teaching myself to see both, and to switch between those views at will, though it's occasionally unsettling to do so.

My younger sister refers to this as "Percolation", as do others (http://www.learningassistance.com/2005/june/percolation.html).

Sometimes, I need to sit with an idea for a week or so before taking action, and the product is great, albeit somewhat rushed. This gets me in trouble on occasion, but less often than one might think.

I've found lately that working piece by piece well before deadline gets about the same quality of work done, but I also have bigger projects and more generous deadlines now.

I'm also hard-of-hearing, but went to a school for the deaf for several years.

When rooming with others (say, on school trips, which were fairly frequent), some of my schoolmates would talk in their sleep, and others would sign.

According to my college roommates, I used to do both with some regularity.

As for telepathy: you're probably correct in asking "How would we know?" Perhaps self-reporting after dreams?

Confirmed. Adding such sensory detail to narrative descriptions is pretty easy to do in American Sign Language (I can't speak for BSL or others, though French Sign Language is pretty close to ASL, from what I understand).

I'm no longer good enough with ASL that I can do all that simultaneously (I'm a native speaker as a result of 8 years at a school for the deaf, but use spoken/written English all but one or two days out of the year).

Here's Virgin's coverage map for voice-usage: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/check-cell-phone-coverage

It looks like Virgin uses Sprint's 3G network. Here's their coverage map: http://coverage.sprint.com/IMPACT.jsp?ECID=vanity:coverage

Finally, here is a CNET review of the LG Optimus V (the phone featured in this particular plan): http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/lg-optimus-v-virgin/4505...